Wednesday, October 28, 2015

The Bending Arc of History

The arc of history bends towards
those who are more determined and more organized irrespective of their
worldview, tactics or values. The moral progress, or rather the expansion of
our ethical worldview that has been achieved over the last few millennia, did
not come as a haphazard or natural development, but as a result of
obsessive determination to achieve it, even as our vision of what it means
remains in constant flux.

Now, with the preceding paragraph
serving as a necessary preamble, let me jot down this note addressed to the
amoral bastards of the world, those loathsome individuals and groups who think
that they could afford to have nothing to do with the Syrian “mess,” and
whatever other messes currently unfolding in that underdeveloped, uncivilized
and seemingly accursed part of the world, the part from which I hail and to
which I still, one way or another, belong:

When you stop getting much of
your oil, natural gas, diamond and gold
from our part of the world; when you no longer need to transport yourselves
and your goods back and forth through it; when your companies stop selling arms
to our corrupt and autocratic regimes and suspend all manner of business with
them; when our cheap labor is no longer needed to produce your goods; when our
elite are no longer allowed to hide their monies in your banks, or spend it in
your markets and resorts; and when you can, in fact, build a dome over us so
that we stop breathing the same air, then, and only then, can you speak of our
concerns and suffering as being irrelevant to you. Until then, I’m afraid, you
just have to put up with us and our seemingly endless supply of “messes,” just
as we put up with you, your arrogance, and your willful blindness as to your
part in “our” messes. When you learn to do this with a greater sense of
humility and humanity, we, that is, the peoples of the world, will all be
better off.

But I am not trying to suggest
here that “we,” that is, the uncivilized brutes of the world if you like, are
completely blameless when it comes to our lot in this world, and that we are
nothing more than hapless and prefect victims to your perfect and willful
villainy. Far from it. I am still quite convinced that we remain the major
obstacle in our own way to a better life, especially that so many of us have
perfected a Shirk ‘N’ Shift routine that allow them to keeping resisting change
even as the reasons for it keep piling up.

So, and while we go about trying
to figure out a way out of this morass, there is a moral imperative that needs
to be addressed by those in the world who have more knowledge and more power to
have a far greater impact in charting our collective becoming than we do at
this stage, and it is as plain and simple as this: stop exploiting us, and
start helping us. It is towards this imperative that the arc-bends of history
are meant to point. In an era when the peoples of the world saw fit to sit
together around one table and pen a document which they billed as the Universal
Declaration of human Rights, we cannot afford to keep treating such an
imperative as an expression of romantic idealism. No. It is, in fact, the
quintessence of realism at this stage.

This development raises a couple
of interesting question, the first: Are mercenaries really that much different
from terrorists? For while the motivations might be different, more material in
the first case and ideological in the latter, there are enough cases where the
two sets of motives seem to be present, and enough commonality when it comes to
the groups’ choice of tactics, and their demonstrable willingness to indulge in
indiscriminate killing to make the distinction rather academic. Perhaps, legal
experts should bear this in mind when investigating war crimes.

*

We heard the drought explanation;
we heard the oil and natural gas explanation, now we have this:

Commodity
Traders Helped Spark the War in Syria, Complex Systems Theorists Say. Yes, it’s the Commodities explanation. Here are my
two cents on all these theories: That drought was a contributing factor to the
rise of popular nonviolent protests phenomenon in Syria is something that has
plenty of factual support; that energy politics might have been on the minds of
so many regional and international players and might have, therefore,
contributed to the policies and strategies they adopted vis-à-vis the issue of
regime change in Syria is not something that we cannot dismiss because such
considerations are always on the minds of global and regional powers; and that
more complex phenomena like the price of commodities could have contributed to
the crisis as well, no matter how indirectly, is also something that needs to
be considered in this hyper-connected world.

But none of this should distract
us from considering the more direct and visible causes at play here: the Assad
regime is inherently corrupt and autocratic, it is guilty of economic
mismanagement on the local and national levels, it failed to deal effectively
with the massive demographic displacement caused by the 2008 drought, its
attempt at economic liberalization backfired and served to enrich the chosen
few while breaking down the middle class, it neglected rural development, was
unconcerned with urban planning, backed Jihadi elements operating in Iraq, Lebanon
and even Jordan, and its record on human rights was dismal as it silenced
dissenters through imprisonment, exile, and in some cases outright murder, and
its policies vis-à-vis the Kurds remained inherently racist. So, when people
took to the streets to protest in early 2011, they had ample reasons and
justifications for doing so, and their aspirations for democratic change were
genuine. This should never be dismissed. People are not going to risk their
lives for vague notions, and no amount of agents provocateurs can incite or
manipulate into rebelling on a mass-scale if the conditions on the ground and
in their minds were not conducive to that. Manipulations happen afterwards, and
no one denies that this revolution was manipulated into a proxy war. Even here
though, the role of the regime was of primary importance in steering us
through.

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World